On being an “oil and gas worker”: dominant discourse, self-representation, and Canada’s energy future
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political wrangling over the future of oil and gas in the context of climate change dominates national debates about Canada’s energy future. These debates frequently rhetorically center around the needs and desires of oil and gas workers. Who, though, do politicians and pundits imagine these workers to be, and how do these imaginations measure up against how these workers imagine themselves and their futures? I answer these questions using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis to examine media and political debates as well as interviews with oil and gas workers. I find that oil and gas workers’ self-representation is considerably more versatile and adaptable to different energy pathways than media and politicians’ representations of them. I use this finding to argue for disaggregating workers’ agency from the dominant stories told about them. Doing so has the potential to open new pathways for energy transition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it